a social influence analysis of perceived organizational support

Tenure. Tenure was utilized as control variable because research has shown that
individuals with higher levels of POS tend to remain in an organization longer than other
employees who have lower POS (note the strong relationship between POS and turnover in
Rhoades & Eisenberger’s (2002) meta-analysis). Tenure was operationalized as the number of
years that an employee worked in the organization. A tenure similarity matrix was constructed
based on absolute difference values between employees’ tenure. Similarity in tenure between
employees was determined by subtracting the tenure of individual i from the tenure of individual
j. The difference between the tenure of these individuals was entered in cell Xij in the tenure
matrix.
Gender. Gender was also utilized as a control variable because research indicates that
gender can influence an individual’s position in informal networks (Brass, 1984; Brass, 1985;
Ibarra, 1993) and in some cases, employees’ perceptions of support (Liaoi, Joshi, & Chung,
2005). Gender was utilized as a dummy variable in which 0 = male and 1 = female. A gender
similarity matrix was constructed which represents the difference between the gender of two
employees, similar to the tenure matrix. With respect to gender, two females would have similar
gender because (dummy variable) 1 – (dummy variable) 1 = 0, indicating similarity in gender.
However, a female (dummy variable 1) – and a male (dummy variable 0) would have a
difference of 1 entered into the corresponding cell in the gender similarity matrix.
Leadership Positions. Whether or not an employee held a leadership position in the
organization was also utilized as a control variable because POS research shows that perceived
supervisor support (Eisenberger et al., 2002) and leader-member exchange (Wayne et al., 1997;
Wayne et al., 2002) are positively related to POS. Leadership was utilized as a dummy variable
in which 0 indicated that an employee did not hold a leadership position and 1 indicated that an
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